With the outbreak of World War I in August 1914, Kiffin Yates Rockwell, from Asheville, North Carolina, volunteered to fight for France. Initially serving with the French Foreign Legion as a soldier in the trenches, he soon became a founding member of the Lafayette Escadrille, a squadron made up mostly of American volunteer pilots who served under the French flag before the United States entered the war. On May 19, 1916, Rockwell became the first American pilot of the war to shoot down a German plane. He was killed during aerial combat on September 23, 1916, at age 24. This book covers Rockwell's early life and military service with the Lafayette Escadrille, the first ever American air combat unit and the precursor to the United States Air Force.

Named one of the Ten Best Books of 2013 by The Economist World War I altered the landscape of the modern world in every conceivable arena. Millions died; empires collapsed; new ideologies and political movements arose; poison gas, warplanes, tanks, submarines, and other technologies appeared. "Total war" emerged as a grim, mature reality. In The Great War, Peter Hart provides a masterful combat history of this global conflict. Focusing on the decisive engagements, Hart explores the immense challenges faced by the commanders on all sides. He surveys the belligerent nations, analyzing their strengths, weaknesses, and strategic imperatives. Russia, for example, was obsessed with securing an exit from the Black Sea, while France--having lost to Prussia in 1871, before Germany united--constructed a network of defensive alliances, even as it held a grudge over the loss of Alsace-Lorraine. Hart offers deft portraits of the commanders, the prewar plans, and the unexpected obstacles and setbacks that upended the initial operations.

Based on extensive research, Cinderella Soldiers uncovers the experiences of the Liverpool Irish Battalion during the Great War. The ethnic core of the battalion represented more than mere shamrock sentimentality: they had been raised within the Catholic Irish enclaves of the north end of the city, where they had been inculcated and nurtured in Celtic culture, traditions and nationalist politics. Throughout the nineteenth century, the Irish in Liverpool were viewed as a violent, drunken, ill-disciplined and disloyal race. These racial perceptions of the Irish continued through the Home Rule Crisis which brought Ireland to the cusp of civil war in 1914. This book offers a different account of an infantry battalion at war. It is the story of how Liverpool's Irish sons, brothers, fathers and lovers fought on the Western Front and how their families in the slums of Liverpool's north end experienced and endured the war.